Your government is spying on you — again.
A heavily redacted letter from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) revealed Thursday that the CIA has been doing some sort of bulk collection of Americans' data. We don't really know the details — those parts are blacked out in the redactions, natch — but it was enough to alarm the senators, who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "These documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans," they said in a joint statement.
This is an old problem, but one that was supposed to have been reined in. It's been nearly a decade since whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency had bulk collected records of Americans' phone calls and emails. Federal courts later found the practice was illegal, and Congress tightened up the laws to end the snooping. (Here's a good Twitter thread detailing the state of the law.)
The CIA, however, literally plays by a different set of rules. The agency's program exists "entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight," Wyden and Heinrich wrote.
That's an obvious problem. Even if bulk collection is somehow justifiable — and that's a big "if" — it's dangerous in a democratic society to let an agency like the CIA hoover up Americans' personal info without some form of outside scrutiny....
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